Creole

"Creole/Man gin-yin an zin"

--Edouard Glissant, 1989 (1981)

(For information on Glissant, see previous selection. This excerpt is also from Caribbean Discourse. Ellipsis marks are mine.)

The prejudices shared by Martinican parents and teachers on the question of the teaching of Creole and teaching in Creole is perhaps a crucial area of concern. It seems that the forces of deculturation no longer need to incite these prejudices. We have all taken over this responsibility. Because Creole is not strong in particular areas of knowledge, parents fear (and they are partly right) that a child speaking Creole in his formative years would be disadvantaged in comparison with another who only spoke French, the language of knowledge. The training of teachers accustomed to pedagogical methods over which they have absolutely no control leads to an attitude of passivity, or to panic in the face of a need for creative daring. Thus an inhibited response is automatically spread because of the existing situation.

According to traditional textbooks, Creole is a patois that is incapable of abstract though and therefore unable to convey "knowledge." We should state that, taken in this sense (as an exclusive privilege of superior languages), abstraction is a presumption of Western thought, a presumption based on technological expertise and the means of dominating nature. There is no other way to organize knowledge that would be linked to both the power of abstraction and technical domination, which are being questioned almost everywhere in today's world.

The appearance of new teaching methods based on multi-lingualism opens original possibilities for treating linguistic contact. Based on this, a methodological synthesis can be envisaged, which can perhaps permit a creative transcendence of the concept of the uniqueness of abstract thought. In multilingual teaching, the child learns, along with his mother tongue, one or several languages considered acceptable (containing a technical potential not found in the mother tongue). But it is not a question of superiority. The language that has the potential to convey "technical information" is not offered as superior to any other. For instance, the English language is not considered "superior" to the French language, and yet the technical information transmitted in the world and constituting an integral part of this language is far superior to what the French language explicitly or implicitly conveys.

If it is assumed that today's universal languages are necessary for technical development (even though one is aware, for instance, of the ravages caused in Africa by the uncritical adoption of Western agricultural techniques), it has been demonstrated that the mother tongue is indispensable in all cases to psychological, intellectual, and emotional equilibrium among members of a community. If one continues to compel the Martinican child to have a French experience in school and a Creole experience at home, the process of collective irresponsibility that afflicts the Martinican community will be reinforced. The principle of multilingualism increases the child's learning capacity because he is free from the kind of dissociation that emerges as inhibitions, complexes, retardation, and sometimes opens the possibility of mental instability. In the context of the persistence of this dissociation and this collective irresponsibility, the whole pursuit of qualifications will continue to be an impossible exercise, because it is empty and pointless.

A university president has publicly declared in the French Caribbean, with the ethnocentric arrogance of his conservative attitudes, that Creole is not a language. It is almost impossible to argue with such a position, because it is based on deepseated ideological self-interest. Linguists have in general dealt harshly with such declarations. However, different tendencies can be noted when it comes to appreciating the nature of this language. Thus, in Haiti two directions emerge: the first, a traditionalist one, represented by M. Jules Faine, author of, among other things, a work entitled Philologie créole awarded a prize by the Academie Française-which argues that the Creole language is an off-shoot of French (before acquiring a separate existence); the other, represented by M. Pradel Pompilus, La langue française en Haiti [. . . ] which defends the hypothesis of the independence of the Creole language. [Glissant here presents a table of Francophone Creole speakers, whom he numbers at around ten million. Most live in the French/French-Creole speaking Caribbean, but the number includes emigrant communities abroad and Creole speakers in the French islands in the Indian ocean. Such a dispersed community, with so many regional/dialectical variants, makes linguistic 'standards' regarding Creole difficult to establish; Glissant notes that creative writers haven't waited for the formulation of general regulations but have written in Creole anyway.]

In most countries, the languages taught in a multilingual situation are not "homogeneous": the consequent risk of syntactical ambiguity is minimal. It is obvious that Creole is a "Francophone" phenomenon, that essentially its lexicon is derived from a French vocabulary for the most part. This, in addition to the constraints imposed on the Creole language, has led to the controversy over "origins": is it a language with its own syntax (in particular, derived from Africa), or is it a dialect of French speech deformed in the eighteenth century (such as the speech of Breton and Norman sailors)?

I proposed in 1975, in a conference in Milwaukee on the possible framework for an ethnopoetics, that the only practical way to proceed in this situation is to make these two languages, linked in this way, separate from each other when they are taught. This separateness, which is important to me, must not be achieved by some contrived transcription that will make written Creole ultimately appear to be some kind of derivative of Greek or Polish. It is not by wishing to make Creole distinct from French at all costs that we will best preserve the specific linguistic nature of Creole. Concern with a specific poetics must be of greater urgency than the question of devising an original spelling.

Giving the language a fixed form also raises some pertinent issues. Are modern civilizations not becoming more oral? Today's approaches to language teaching tend to reduce the imperious, even imperialist, domination of the written and to emphasize the oral. Will not oral languages be more at ease (because of their very flexibility) in this new cultural climate? Some Haitian linguists have claimed that attempting to formalize the Creole language will only reduce its creativity. It is perhaps more useful to enlighten students on the real relationship between oral and written than to enclose them in the relative sterility of two grammatical systems, one of which would be in the process of being developed, or of two lexicons, one of which would be made as distinct as possible from the other. The necessary inclusion of both Creole and French in the school system does not imply a laborious teaching of syntax, but rather a creative confrontation of two worldviews.

All poetics have implications for a general politics. That is why I say that, as parents and teachers, we are guilty of the same lack of responsibility. Our prejudices reinforce those of the Martinican child. In class he is exposed to the world of the serious, of work, of hierarchical relationships, with which he naturally associates the French language. At play, he reverts to Creole, with which he associates the world of recreation, freedom, and lack of restraint. This would be all well and good if he did not in addition make the link between Creole and irresponsibility. We help to strengthen this association.

The main source of our prejudice is that we clearly see that indeed in Martinique today the Creole language is one in which we no longer produce anything. And a language in which a people no longer produces is a language in agony. Creole is impoverished because terms relating to professions disappear, because vegetable oils disappear, because animal species disappear, because a whole series of expressions that were linked to forms of collective responsibility in the country are disappearing as this responsibility diminishes. The socio-linguistic study of terms fallen into disuse and that have not been replaced reveals that this happens because Martinicans as such no longer do anything in their country. The linguistic impoverishment that results echoes throughout the entire syntactical continuum of the language. This is how we move progressively from the impasse in the school system to the disappearance of Martinique as a community - nothing but a collective of individuals without links, to either their land or their history, or themselves.

That is why any reform that envisages the introduction of the teaching of Creole in a technical way in our educational system will be futile and ambiguous if it is not conceived, discussed, agreed to, by Martinicans themselves. [. . .]

Man gin-yin an zin

With this opening line taken from a Creole sentence that I imagine has often been pronounced by the fishermen of Martinique, during the period of what I call "functional" Creole, I will try to convey my thoughts on how a language could possibly slip into decline.

Man gin-yin an zin. "I have bought a fishhook." Two features of Creole are represented here. The French verb gagner (to earn), used with the meaning of acheter (to buy). It is very possible that this is inherited from old French; that is not important: its appropriation by the Creole language has been complete. The word zin used for the word hameçon (fishhook), and I am not here interested in the process of substitution or adaptation: if, for instance, it might originate in the French word zinc and if, consequently, the material (or something like it) is meant to represent the object.

What interests me is that the expression has achieved, while maintaining a kind of linguistic integrity, an independence such that it is only heard under specific conditions. It is also true that this expression is - both for the community and for a group of fishermen - an expression of solidarity. What is the "context" for this expression? Not the ideal situation of a happy fisherman, earning his livelihood in an unexploited way. But at the very least that of a fisherman still master of his technology, capable of transforming it, finding someone to transmit it to. Catching his fish "in Creole" and buying his zin in the same way: I mean that the language is not only applicable when fishing takes place but to what happens before and after.

J'ai acheté un hameçon. "I bought a fishhook." How does a fisherman today say this coming out of one of these modern department stores or these "specialist shops where the tools of his trade are mixed up with the rigging needed by tourists for their chartered sailboats or by those who like one-man crossings of the Atlantic? He says: Man acheté an amson. Why? Because the fishhook is not, in his mind, a zin; because the salesman speaks to him (or he speaks to the salesman) in French; because the very traditions of his trade elude him. Is there anything wrong with this? Cannot a community become usefully acculturated, make the transition from an oral mother tongue to a prestigious written language without being ruined? Of course it could be done if this transition were made by an autonomous movement of the society on its own.

But the Martinican fisherman says: Man acheté an amson because he has no control over the technical aspects of his trade. At the same time the language of prestige has both established its values in the wider community and imposed itself on the practical world of the fisherman. It has imposed a written form, integrating its linguistic structure in a form of expression that then ceases to be expressive.

That is the inadequacy that is referred to sometimes when it is pointed out that some languages like Creole "have missed the boat of the industrial revolution." There are, apparently, great universal languages, historically destined to develop because they "provide" machines (for counting, measuring, constructing, writing), and there are others already marked for extinction because they "serve" no purpose.

I do not support this point of view. It is not necessarily true that the future of mankind depends totally on the domination of the technology of the developed world. Without reverting to an ecstatic vision of this future, and without succumbing to the idyll of eating fruit washed in spring water and riding our mules once again, we are justified in visualizing, in those countries where this is possible, a restoration of the balance between man's domination of nature and the way he lives nature, a new order that would naturally presuppose the victory of popular struggles over dominant injustice and inequality, that of a popular consciousness over elitist authority. Within this possible framework, use of language would match the relationship with the wider community, without being alienated because of its contact with a distant culture.

This is not the case with Creole today. It has stopped being a functional language: it is being undermined by a dominant language. [. . .] All that the Creole language has achieved: the transcendence of linguistic compromise, the sublimation of the rhythmic camouflage - all of that risks being lost in this process of marginalization, produced by both an absence of productivity and an absence of creativity.

In such a circumstance, the limitations of any attempt to standardize Creole are obvious. It is of no consequence whether you choose to write Man acheté en hameçon or Man acheté en lanmson, or Ma aste a amson: the method of transcription that you will have used, no matter how distinct from a French transcription, will not prevent the weakened form of the language from already existing in your expression. We must begin by going back to the poetics of the language: the mechanism it uses to avoid the potential danger of linguistic compromise. It is based on this poetics and the consequent exercise of creativity that little by little the future forms of writing in Creole will emerge. That is the job of the storyteller, of the performer within language-but one who cannot envisage his role except when the common will puts in place the economic, social, and political conditions for the development of the language. In the meantime, the work done by linguists offers us useful guidelines. It must be understood for what it is: a preparation for future growth, not any essential and exclusive need for some pseudoscientific study of linguistic dynamics.